One Black Dog
Starting in September, I unwittingly entered the Doldrums. I'm not even sure when it started, though my therapist thinks it's linked to when Atom started high school. Maybe. Though I am less convinced that it's a "oh my baby is growing up, I have to rethink my identity because I've been too wrapped up in being a mom" thing. It feels too pat. This felt different than the other times when I felt down and out.
My brain whirrs along at a certain speed. Probably faster than the average mind, to its own detriment. It trips along at its own clip, and sometimes it whirrs so fast that it drives itself into a tizzy. That's the familiar "I feel burnt out and need to take a mental health day" feeling. Wrung out. Like my brain is too full of things jostling around. When I reach that point, I take a day off from work, so I can take each item out of this box in my head, take care of it (tick off this lingering to-do item), toss them, or reorganize it neatly before I can carry on. I could never figure out whether this was a me problem, a parent problem, a working parent problem, or a single working parent problem. I made my peace with taking a day off to take care of these things because it made me feel better. We all know weekends don't work for this because weekends are too full. It needs to be a day off from work, when the kid is at school (crucial feature).
Except this time, it was different. Instead of my brain going faster and faster, it seemed like the engine stopped entirely. My brain felt empty of its usual baseline chatter. And instead of feeling at peace, I felt like I'd been turned off. I was in low power mode. Life kept going. I kept making dinner. Kept going to work. And all that my kid noticed was maybe that I was a little grumpier than usual. I stopped talking to my friends. I didn't feel like engaging in the usual school gossip, or mid life existential angst, and everything we used to talk about or feel excited about felt stupid and pointless. I also didn't want to talk about how I was feeling, because I didn't want to encounter questions I didn't have the answers to. Why am I feeling this way? Was there something that triggered it? Is there anything they can do to support me? I also simultaneously felt strung out. Even my morning coffee did nothing to help this. Nothing. This surprised me in a dull way.
It carried on through October and partway through November. I couldn't wrangle up the energy or motivation to go on my usual birthday hike so settled for a ferry trip to the beach. We got there and I spent most of the afternoon sleeping on a bench. I told myself I must be really tired. I went to our Academy meeting and thought the long weekend away from the usual routine would perk me up, and even got a massage while there. It didn't. I thought about the things that everyone talks about for self-care. The things I used to do to help myself feel better. Morning stretches by the river. Meditation. Journaling. Things that have been tried and true in my own life for pickmeups. I didn't do any of them. Didn't even try them. Mostly because I didn't feel like it. It felt stupid and useless. Like it'd be an exercise in futility. Checkboxing.
In therapy, I told my therapist that it felt like life was hopeless. I blamed the current state of our country. I told her I stopped watching the news because it was too much. I pointed to the upcoming Medicare cuts, told her that it feels like I'm spinning my wheels every year for less money. That it feels like I just can't get ahead. In many ways that is objectively true. It's been a hard ten years for people in healthcare. The pandemic. Post-pandemic. The subsequent cuts by the current administration. The rise of insurance profits. But it's not true that I haven't caught a break. I've caught a few. It's also true that the breaks I've caught haven't set me forward by much, because every lucky break was offset by some circumstance outside of my control that also happened. You could say the "lucky break" prevented even further financial erosion.
At some point, I started wondering if I should start antidepressants. After a week of thinking about it, I took a PHQ9. It said that you have to be feeling this way for three months before it would qualify as depression. Three months. That is a long time. I was not at three months. I decided maybe I should wait. I didn't actively think about suicide. But I did passively think about how I wouldn't be too sad if I were to die in some kind of accident. I even cried, thinking about the impact it would have on my kid. That made me more sad than the thought of my own life ending. I did a lot of triggered crying. It felt like anything and everything tipped me over the edge for crying. Instagram Reels. Random thoughts on the subway going to work. Hearing stories about tragedies that happened to friends of friend's families.
And then one day, I started to feel better. Maybe I got more sleep. Maybe it was the day off I finally took to get my brain organized. I remember blocking that day off on my work calendar, and fixating on that date, telling myself I just had to hang on until then. I was alone at home, in the silence. No music. The kid was at school. And I took out the many many many lists I had of things that had to get done, and started to slowly knock them off. I didn't get through all of them. But I blocked off next Monday (and many Mondays in December and January, if that gives you an idea of how desperate I was feeling) so there's plenty of time to get through the rest. I don't know that I can credit "checking off my to do list" for what helped me feel better. I think maybe it gave me the time and space to unfurl. Maybe I would have started to feel better this week anyways, and I happened to have a day off to notice.
In my journal that day (I felt better enough to start a journal entry), I rated my mood as a 3-4 out of 10, with a 5 being perfectly neutral - not positive or negative. I estimate my baseline probably sits around a 7. I usually feel pretty upbeat with some grumpy moments, and even my grumpy moments are with verve. I was sitting at a 0-1 for most of September and October. Maybe it was hormones and perimenopause (don't we like to blame everything on perimenopause these days?). I don't know what it was. But I can tell you that it lifted. Yesterday and today, I feel like I'm at a 5-6, and approaching 7. I don't know what happened, but I'm glad it's over. Time will tell if this is a recurring thing. I feel like my brain started up again. Call it qi. Call it energy. But whatever it is that whirs along and gives me life, making me me, it started up again.